Clay Siegall is among most talented CEOs in America

Most of the top dogs in America’s coporate world have worked their way up through either paper pushing management jobs or through simply being in the right place at the right time. Not infrequently, such means of being appointed to the top, most highly paid positions in American companies has engendered a great deal of hostility in the workers who have dedicated their lives to making those companies the best in their respective businesses.

This can be seen, for example, in the case of Vice President Dick Cheney being appointed to the top slot at oil contractor Halliburton. Having spent virtually no time whatsoever in the oil services business, Cheney was appointed CEO by the outgoing executive. In the process, literally, thousands of highly qualified personnel, who had spent their entire lives dedicated to making Halliburton the best oil services company in the world, were passed over for promotion, with management opting instead for a career bureaucrat with insider beltway connections.

Although a case such as that above, where someone with literally no experience is appointed CEO, passing over thousands of qualified in-house candidates in the process, is rare, similar things do happen all of the time throughout the corporate world. For this reason it’s rare to see a CEO who is actually hyper-qualified for the position that he holds. But they do exist.

One such CEO is Clay Siegall. As both founder and CEO of Seattle Genetics, Dr. Siegall may be one of the most qualified and talented CEOs in the country today. Having spent more than 15 years as a cutting-edge cancer researcher, Dr. Siegall was instrumental in the development of an entirely new class of targeted cancer therapy drugs, known as antibody drug conjugates. These groundbreaking drugs have proven the concept of using human-like antibodies, often synthetically produced in a lab, to deliver highly toxic chemicals directly to the site of the cancer cells. This has not only radically increased the effectiveness of cancer treatment, it has also virtually eliminated the horrible side effects long associated with the mainstay treatments of radiation, chemotherapy and radical surgical excisions.